Posts Tagged ‘Daniel Goleman’

Readers of the Healthymemory blog should be familiar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect from previous posts. The Dunning-Kruger Effect describes the phenomenon of people thinking they know much more about a topic than they actually know, compared to the knowledgeable individual who is painfully aware of how much he still doesn’t know about the topic in question.

In the blog post “The Antithesis of the Enlightenment” HM wondered how people would rate the following statement by David Deutsch,
“Everything that is not forbidden by the laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.”
HM’s own response was, “HM would say that this is an empirical question so we don’t know yet.”

HM was answering on two levels. The Dunning-Kruger Effect states that the more knowledgeable one is, the more uncertain one is of his knowledge. This is certainly true for HM. Since graduating from high school, his learning has informed him of how much more he does not know. He expects this to continue to the end of his lifetime. Moreover, even within his supposed areas of expertise, there is a limit to what he can know and grasp. Much of what HM knows and believes is based on what true experts know. Moreover, HM thinks one should never be certain. Any belief can be overturned with better data or better arguments.

Homo sapiens is constrained by limitations in attentional processing in short term memory. Long-term memory is malleable, and changes over time. So human physiology constrains cognitive abilities. As Daniel Goleman described in his book, Emotional Intelligence, we have a nervous system adapted to performance to the world of early humans were dangers were omnipresent. This can still be seen in the daily violence reported in the news, and in our propensity for warfare, even when it is realized that todays weapons could make homo sapiens extinct.

In the general area of science, there seems to be overconfidence in how much we know. At the turn of the 19th century, some prominent physical scientists apparently thought that virtually everything was known. By 1905 Einstein published his special theory of relativity, to be followed ten years later by his general theory of relativity. And by the mid-twenties quantum physics came on the horizon. We can never know what might be just around the corner.

Unfortunately, science is often viewed as competing with the concept of God, without appreciating how limited current science is. Specific religious beliefs are not required for a belief in God. There are more parsimonious accounts available for all religions, and one of the tenets of science is to accept the most parsimonious explanation. Nevertheless, if someone finds comfort in a religion, that person should not be denied that comfort. The exception to this is when the individual tries to impose his religious beliefs or laws that come from those religious beliefs onto others. Judge not, that ye be no judged should always be remembered. Live your religious beliefs, but let others live their own beliefs whether they are religious or not. Unfortunately some churches are heavily involved in politics, and wield an unhealthy political influence. Moreover, they are tax-exempt. Any church that is engaged in or that encourages their congregations to vote or work in a political area, should have their tax-exemptions revoked.

The mathematician Blaise Pascal made what HM regards as a compelling justification for a belief in God. Although he made his justification in a different context, the basic form of the argument holds. His argument was in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. He argued that the benefits of believing needed to be weighed against the costs of not- believing. If someone does not believe, and God does exist, then the consequences could be frightening. However, if you believe, and God does not exist, you would never know. And during one’s lifetime one would have the comfort in believing in a just and merciful God. As HM never is certain about anything, this logic compels him to believe in God. And that belief is comforting, even should it be wrong.

The title of this post is identical to the title of the last chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” The chapter begins with calling the roll for a class in Self Science at the Nueva School. Each student responds not with “here” or “present” but with a number from 1 to 10. 1 means low spirits and 10 high spirits. They explain their ratings and low numbers can warrant considerable discussion.

The subject in Self Science is feelings—your own and those that erupt in relationships. The nature of the topic demands that teachers and students focus on the emotional fabric of a child’s life—a focus that is determinedly ignored in almost every other classroom in America. The strategy includes using the tensions and traumas of children’s lives as the topic of the day. Teachers speak to real issues—hurt over being left out, envy, disagreements that could escalate into a schoolyard battle. As Karen Stone McOwen, the developer of the Self Science Curriculum and founder of Nueva, put it, “Learning doesn’t take place in isolation from kid’s feelings. Being emotionally literate is as important as instruction in math and reading.”

The chapter includes a discussion of the Cooperation Squares game, in which students team up to put together a series of square-shaped jigsaw puzzles. The catch: their teamwork is all in silence, with no gesturing allowed. The class is divided into three groups, each assigned to a different table. Three observers, each familiar with the game, get an evaluation sheet to assess, for example, who in the group takes the lead in organizing, who is a clown, who disrupts.

One group finishes quickly; a second group starts slowly at first, but then finishes; the third group struggles. The teacher offers some encouragement: “Those of you who have finished can give one specific hint to those who are still working. A suggestion is made and the puzzle is solved.

During a discussion mulling over the object lessons in teamwork that were learned an argument breaks out as to what gesturing is and whether it is allowed. The argument begins to get somewhat loud and the teacher says “This isn’t a criticism—you cooperated very well, but Tucker, try to say what you mean in a tone of voice that doesn’t sound so critical. The discussion as to how best to be positive in making a point and in providing advice.

Students in Self Science learn that the point is not to avoid conflict completely, but to resolve disagreement and resentment before it spirals in and out-and-out fight. Assertiveness as distinct from aggression or passivity is taught at Nueva from third grade on. It emphasizes expressing feelings forthrightly, but in a way that will not spiral into aggression. Writing this, HM had the thought that, perhaps, Self Science should be taught in the US Congress. Self Science has been effective in the inner city. On second thought, yes, perhaps in the inner city, but not in the US Congress.

Dr. David Hamburg, a psychiatrist and president of the Carnegie Corporation, which has evaluated some pioneering emotional-education programs, sees the years of transition into grade school and then again into junior high or middle school as marking two crucial points in a child’s development. From ages 6 to 11 school is a crucible and a defining experience that will heavily influence children’s adolescence and beyond. A child’s sense of self-worth depends substantially on his or her ability to achieve in school. A child who failed in school sets in motion the self-defeating attitudes that can dim prospects for an entire lifespan. Among the essentials for profiting from school are an ability to postpone gratification, to be socially responsible in appropriate ways, to maintain control over their emotions, and to have have an optimistic outlook—in other words, emotional intelligence.

Puberty, because it is a time of extraordinary change in the child’s biology, thinking capacities, and brain functioning, is also a crucial time for emotional and social lessons. As for the teen years Hamburg observes that “most adolescents are 10 to 15 years old when they are exposed to sexuality, alcohol and drugs, smoking and other temptations.”

Hamburg notes that as students are entering middle school just on the cusp of adolescence, there is something different about those who have had emotional intelligence classes: they find the new pressures of peer politics, the upping of academic demands, and the temptations to smoke and use drugs less troubling than do their peers. They have mastered emotional abilities that, at least for the short term, inoculate them against the turmoil and pressures they are about to face.

The following stop light is used in self science for impulse control:
Red light 1. Stop, calm down, and think before you act.
Yellow light 2. Say the problem and how you feel.
3. Set a positive goal.
4. Think of posts of solutions.
5. Think ahead of the consequences.
Green Light 6. Go ahead and try the best plan.

SELF SCIENCE OBJECTIVES

EMOTIONAL SELF-AWARENESS
* Improvement in recognizing and naming own emotions.
* Better able to understand the causes of feelings
* Recognizing the difference between feelings and actions

* More responsible
* Better able to focus on the task at hand and pay attention
* Less impulsive; more self-control
* Improved scores on achievement tests

EMPATHY: READING EMOTIONS

* Better able to take another person’s perspective
* improve empathy and sensitivity to other’s feelings
* Better at listening to others

HANDLING RELATIONSHIPS

* Increased ability to analyze and understand relationships
* Better at resolving conflicts and negotiating disagreements
* Better at solving problems in relationships
* More assertive and skilled in communicating
* More popular and outgoing friendly and involved with peers
* More sought out by peers
* More concerned and considerate
* More “pro-social” and harmonious in groups
* More sharing, cooperation, and helpfulness
* More democratic in dealing with others

Some might argue that teachers are already overloaded. How can more demands be place upon them? The answer is that increasing emotional intelligence will not only make them better and more effective students, but is also likely that these lessons will also have beneficial effect for many families.

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” To get a sense of the cost of emotional illiteracy just watch the news or read the newspaper, and ask yourself, how many incidents were the result of a lack of emotional intelligence?

We have been, and we still are suffering from an emotional malaise. Consider children. Too many children are plagued by the following problems:

*Withdrawal or social problems: preferring to be alone; being secretive; sulking a lot; lacking energy; feeling unhappy; being overly dependent.

*Anxious and depressed: being lonely; having many fears and worries; needing to be perfect; feeling unloved; feeling nervous or sad and depressed.

*Attention or thinking problems: unable to pay attention or still daydreaming; acting without thinking; being too nervous to concentrate; doing poorly on schoolwork; unable to get mind off thoughts. Perhaps it is ironic that the new technology has contributed to thinking problems. Plugged in children are checking to see if they’re liked. They’re flitting from topic to topic; superficially processing and rarely engaging in detailed thinking.

*Delinquent or aggressive: hanging around kids who get in trouble; lying and cheating; arguing a lot; being mean to other people; demanding attention; destroying other people’s things; disobeying at home and at school; being stubborn and moody; talking too much; teasing a lot; having a hot temper.

Goleman writes, While any of these problems in isolation raises no eyebrows, taken as a group they are barometers of a sea change, a new kind of toxicity seeping into and poisoning the very experience of childhood, signifying sweeping deficits in emotion competencies. The emotional malaise seems to be a universal price of modern life for children.

Urie Bronfenbfrenner, the eminent Cornell University developmental psychologist who did an international comparison of children’s well being said: “In the absence of good support systems, external stresses have become so great that even strong families are falling apart. The hecticness, instability, and inconsistency of daily family life are rampant in all segments of our society, including the well-educated and well-to-do. What is at stake is nothing less than the next generation, particularly males, who in growing up are especially vulnerable to such disruptive forces as the devastating effects of divorce poverty and unemployment.

Bullying is a recognized problem. Moreover, technology has provided yet another means of bullying. This bullying has resulted in suicides of the bullied parties. Not all angry children are bullies; some are social outcasts who overreact to being teased or to what they perceive as slights or unfairness. The one perceptual flaw that unites such children is that they perceive slights where none were intended, imagining their peers to be more hostile toward them than they really are.

Depression should not just be treated, but prevented in children. Even mild episodes of depression in children augur more severe episodes later in life. Of course, every child gets sad from time to time; childhood and adolescence are like adulthood, time of occasional disappointments and losses large and small with attendant grief. The need for prevention is not for these times, but for those children for whom sadness spirals downward into a gloom that leave them despairing, irritable, and withdrawn—a far more severe melancholy.

The cost to children goes beyond the suffering caused by depression itself Kids learn social skills in their peer relations such as what to do if you want something and aren’t getting it, seeing how other children handle the situation and then trying it yourself. But depressed kinds are likely to be among the neglected children in a school, the ones other kids don’t play with much.

Depression can be short -circuited by stopping depressionogenric ways of thought. Just as with adults, pessimistic ways of interpreting life’s defeats seem to feed the sense of helplessness and hopelessness at the heart of children’s depression. Research has found that children are more prone to melancholy toward this pessimistic outlook before they become depressed. This provides a window of opportunity for inoculating them against depression before it strikes.

There was a study of low-level depression, which is depression not severe enough to say it was beyond ordinary unhappiness, at a high school in Oregon. Seventy-five of the mildly depressed students learned to challenge the thinking patters associated with depression, to become more adept at making friends, to get along better with their parents, and to engage in more social activities they found pleasant. By the end of the eight-week program, 55% of the students had recovered from their mild depression, while only about a quarter of equally depressed students not in the program had begun to pull out of their depression. A year later a quarter of those in the comparison group had gone on to fall into a major depression as opposed to only 14% of students in the depression-prevention program. The eight session program seemed to have cut the risk of depression in half.

Steven Asher, a University of Illinois psychologist has designed a series of “friendship coaching” sessions for unpopular children. He identified third and fourth graders who were least liked in their classes. Asher gave them six sessions in how to “make playing games more fun” through being friendly, fun, and nice.” To avoid stigma, the children were told that they were acting as “consultants” to the coach, who was trying to learn what kinds of things make it more enjoyable to play games. This mini course in getting along had a remarkable effect: a year later the children who’re coached—all of whom were selected because they were the least liked in class—were now solidly in the middle of classroom popularity.

Problems such as eating disorders, alcohol and drug abuse need to have special programs.

Goleman argues for no more wars on such problems. Rather a final common preventive pathway to prevention is needed. In a five-year project sponsored by the W.T. Grant Foundation, a consortium of researchers studied the research and distilled the active ingredients that seemed crucial to successful programs. The emotional skills include self-awareness, identifying, expressing, and managing feelings; impulse control and delaying gratification; and handling stress and anxiety. A key ability in impulse control is knowing the difference between feelings and actions, and learning to make better emotional decisions by first controlling the impulse to act, then identifying alternative actions and their consequences before acting. Many competencies are interpersonal: reading social and emotional cues, listening, being able to resist negative influences, taking others’ perspectives, and understanding what behavior is acceptable in a situation.

The next post will provide an answer to the question, “What would an education in emotions look like?”

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” Goleman writes, “The clearest answer to this question comes from the work of Jerome Kagan, the eminent psychologist at Harvard University.” For those who do not want to continue reading this post, the answer is that temperament is most definitely not destiny. For those who want to understand why this is the case, please continue reading.

Kagan posits that there are at least four temperamental types—timid, bold, upbeat, and melancholy—and that each is due to a different pattern of brain activity. There are likely innumerable differences in patterns of brain activity, each based on innate differences in temperamental endowment, each based on innate differences in emotional circuitry; for any given emotion people can differ in how easily it triggers, how long it lasts, and how intense it becomes. Kagan’s work concentrates on the dimension of temperament that runs from boldness to timidity.

Mothers have been bringing their infants and toddlers to Kagan’s Laboratory for Child Development for decades. Kagan and his coresearchers noticed early signs of shyness in a group of twenty-one-month old toddlers brought in for experimental observations. In free play with other toddlers, some were bubbly and spontaneous, playing with other babies without the least hesitation. However, others were uncertain and hesitant, hanging back, clinging to their mothers, quietly watching the others at play. Almost four years later, when these same children were in kindergarten, Kagan’s group observed them again. Over the intervening years none of the outgoing children had become timid, while two thirds of the timid ones were still reticent.

Kagan believes that the difference between the timid and the bold lies in the excitability of a neural circuit centered in the amygdala. Kagan proposes that people who are prone to fearfulness are born with a neurochemistry that makes this circuit easily aroused, so they avoid the unfamiliar, shy away from uncertainty, and suffer anxiety. Those who have a nervous system calibrated with a much higher threshold for amygdala arousal, are less easily frightened, more naturally outgoing, and eager to explore new places and meet new people.

When young men and women who were quite shy in childhood are measured in a laboratory while exposed to stresses such as harsh smells, their heart rate stays elevated much longer than for their outgoing peers. This is a sign that surging norepinephrine is keeping their amygdala excited and, through connected neural circuits, their sympathetic nervous system aroused. Kagan found that timid children levels of reactivity across the range of sympathetic nervous system indices, from higher resting blood pressure and greater dilation of the pupils, to higher levels of norepinephrine markers in their urine.

Moving to the upbeat-melancholy continuum, some people’s emotions seem to gravitate toward the positive pole. These people are naturally upbeat and easygoing, while others are dour and melancholy. This dimension of temperament—ebullience at one end, melancholy at the other—seems linked to the relative activity of the right and left prefrontal areas. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, someone who has appeared in many previous healthymemory blog posts, discovered that people who have greater activity in the left frontal lobe compared to the right, are by temperament cheerful; they typically take delight in people and in what life presents them with.

The encouraging news from Kagan’s studies is that not all fearful infants grow up hanging back from life—temperament is not destiny, Kagan’s research team found that some of the mothers held to the philosophy that they should protect their timid toddlers from whatever was upsetting; others felt it was more important to help their children learn how to cope with these upsetting moments, and so adapt to life’s small struggles. The protective belief seems to have abetted fearfulness, probably by depriving the youngsters of opportunities for learning how to overcome their fears: The “learn to adapt” philosophy of childrearing seems to have helped fearful children become braver.

Kagan’s conclusion: “It appears that mothers who protect their highly reactive infants from frustration and anxiety in the hope of effecting a benevolent outcome seem to exacerbate the infant’s uncertainty and produce the opposite effect.

Some children, though shy by temperament, who were more emotionally competent, spontaneously outgrew their timidity. Being more socially skilled, they were far more likely to have a succession of positive experiences with other children. For example, even if they were tentative about speaking to a new playmate, once the ice was broken they were able to shine socially.

Even innate emotional patterns can change to some degree. A child who comes into the world easily frightened can learn to be calmer, or even outgoing, in the face of the familiar. Fearfulness—or any other temperament—may be part of the biological givens of our emotional lives, but we are not necessarily limited to a specific emotional menu by our inherited traits. Our emotional capacities are not a given; with the right learning, they can be improved. The reasons for this lie in how the human brain matures.

Psychotherapy can be systematic emotional relearning. It stands as a case in point of the way experience can both change emotional patterns and shape the brain. One of the most dramatic demonstrations of this point comes from a study of people being treated for obsessive-compulsive disorders. Hand washing is one of the more common compulsions which can be done so often, even hundreds of times a day, that the person’s skin cracks. PET scan studies show that obsessive-compulsives have greater than normal activity in their prefrontal lobes. Half of the patients in the study received the standard drug treatment, fluoxetine (better known by the brand name Prozac), and half behavior therapy. During the therapy they were systematically exposed to the object of their obsession or compulsion without performing it; patients with hand-washing compulsions were put at a sink, but not allowed to wash. At the same time they learned to question the fears and dreads that spurned them on—for example the failure to wash would mean that they would get a disease and die. Gradually, through months of such training, the compulsions faded, just as they did with the medications. A PET scan test showed that the behavior therapy patients had as significant a decrease in the activity of a key part of the emotional brain, the caudate nucleus as did the patients successfully treated with the drug fluoxetine.

Several brain areas critical for emotional life are among the slowest to mature. The sensory areas mature during early childhood, and the limbic system by puberty, the frontal lobes—seat of emotional self-control, understanding, and artful response, do not fully mature until the mid twenties.

One of the most essential emotional lessons, first learned in infancy and refined throughout childhood, is how to soothe oneself when upset. This art of soothing oneself is mastered over many years and with new means, as brain maturation offers a child progressively more sophisticated emotional tools. The frontal lobes, so important for regulating limbic pulse mature into the mid-twenties. Another key circuit that continues to shape itself through childhood centers on the vagus nerve, which at one end regulates the heart and other parts of the body, and at the other sends signals to the amygdala via other circuits, prompting to secrete the catecholamines, which is the prime fight-or-flight response. A University of Washington team that assessed the impact of childrearing discovered that emotionally adept parenting led to a change for the better in vagus-nerve function. John Gotten, the psychologist who led the research explained, “Parents modify their children’s vagal tone”—a measure of how easily triggered the vagus nerve is—“by coaching them emotionally: talking to children about their feelings and how to understand them, not being critical and judgmental, problem-solving about emotional predicaments, coaching them on what to do like alternatives to hitting, or were better able to suppress the vagal activity that keep the amygdala priming the body with fight-or-flight hormones—and so were better behaved.

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” The primary topic of this chapter is the frequently discussed and written about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a disorder of the limbic system. The main symptoms of such learned fearfulness, including the most intense kind, can be accounted for by changes in the limbic circuitry focusing on the amygdala. Some key changes are in the locus ceruleus, a structure that regulates the brain’s secretion of two substances called catecholamines: adrenaline and noradrenaline. The neurochemicals mobilize the body for any emergency; the same catecholamine surge stamps memories with special strength. This system becomes hyperactive in PTSD, secreting extra-large doses of these brain chemicals in response to situations that hold little or no threats, but somehow are reminders of the original trauma.

The locus ceruleus and the amygdala are closely linked, along with other limbic structures such as the hippocampus and hypothalamus; the circuitry for the catecholamines extends into the cortex. Changes in the circuits are thought to underlie PTSD symptoms, which include anxiety, fear, hyper vigilance, being easily upset and aroused, readiness for fight or flight, and the indelible encoding of intense emotional memories. One study found that Vietnam vets with PTSD had 40% fewer catecholamine-stopping receptors than did men without the symptoms, suggesting that their brains had undergone a lasting change, with their catecholamine secretion poorly controlled.

Other changes occur in the circuit linking the limbic brain with the pituitary gland, which regulates the release of CRF, the main stress hormone the body secretes to mobilize the emergency fight-or-flight response. The changes lead this hormone to be overselected—particularly in the amygdala, hippocampus and locus ceruleus—alerting the body for an emergency that is not there in reality.

A third set of changes occurs in the brain’s opiod system, which secretes endorphins to blunt the feeling of pain. It also becomes hyperactive. This neural circuit again involves the amygdala, this time in concert with a region in the cerebral cortex. The opioids are powerful numbing agents, like opium and other narcotics that are chemical cousins. When experiencing high levels of opioids, people have a heightened tolerance for pain.

Something similar seems to occur in PTSD. Endorphin changes add a new dimension to the neural mix triggered by preexposure to trauma: a numbing of certain feelings. This seems to explain a set of “negative” psychological symptoms long noted in PTSD: anhedonia and a general emotional numbness, a sense of being cut off from life or from concern about others’ feelings. Those close to such people may experience this indifference as a lack of empathy. Another possible effect may be dissociation, which includes the inability to remember crucial minutes, hours, or even days of the traumatic event.

The neural changes of PTSD also seem to make a person more susceptible to further traumatizing. A number of studies with animals have found that when they were exposed even to mild stress when young, they were far more vulnerable than unstressed animals to trauma -induced brain changes later in life. This seems to be a reason that, exposed to the same catastrophe, one person goes on to develop PTSD, and another does not: the amygdala is primed to find danger, and when life presents it once again wth real danger, the alarm rises to a higher pitch.

All these neural changes offer short-term advantages for dealing with the the grim and dire angers that prompt them. However, these short-term advantages become a lasting problem when the brain changes so that they become predispositions, like a car stuck in high gear. The amygdala and its connected brain regions take on a new set point during a moment of intense trauma.

Dr. Judith Lewis Herman is a Harvard psychiatrist whose groundbreaking work outlines the steps to recovery from trauma. The first step is regaining a sense of safety, presumably translates to finding ways to calm the too-fearful, too easily triggered emotions circuits enough to allow relearning. Typically this begins with helping parties understand that their jumpiness and nightmares, hyper vigilance and panics, are part of the symptoms of PTSD. The understanding makes the symptoms themselves less frightening.

The sense in which PTSD patients feel “unsafe” goes beyond fears that dangers lurk all around them: their insecurity begins more intimately in the feeling that they have no control over what is happening in their body and to their emotions. This is understandable, given the hair-trigger for emotional hijacking that PTSD creates by hyper sensitizing the amygdala circuitry.

Medication offers some way to restore patients’ sense that they need not be so at the mercy of the emotional alarms that flood them with anxiety, keep them sleepless, or pepper their sleep with nightmares. Unfortunately, today’s medications preclude doing exactly what they would like to achieve. For now, there are medications that counter only some of the needed changes, notably the antidepressants that act on the serotonin system and beta-blockers like propanol, which block the activation of the sympathetic nervous system.

Patients also may learn relaxation techniques that give them the ability to counter their edginess and nervousness. A physiological calm opens a window for helping the brutalized emotional circuitry rediscover that life is not a threat and for giving back to patients some of the sense of security they had in their lives before the trauma occurred.

Another step in healing involves retelling and reconstructing the story of the trauma in the harbor of that safety, allowing the emotional circuitry to acquire a new, more realistic understanding of and response to the traumatic memory and its triggers. As patients retell the horrific details of the trauma, the memory starts to be transformed, both in its emotional meaning and in its effects on the emotional brain. The pace of this retelling is delicate; ideally it mimics the pace that occurs naturally in those people who are able to recover from trauma without suffering PTSD. In these cases there often seems to be an inner close that “doses” people with intrusive memories that relive the trauma, intercut with weeks or months when they remember hardly anything of the horrible events.

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” Goleman writes that research has shown that the three most common emotionally inept parenting styles are:

*Ignoring feelings altogether. Such parents treat a child’s emotional upset as trivial or a bother, something they should wait to blow over. They fail to use emotional moments as a chance to get closer to the child or to help the child learn lessons in emotional competence.

*Being too “laissez-faire.” These parents notice how a child feels, but hold that however a child handles the emotional storm is fine—even, say, hitting. Like those who ignore a child’s feelings, these parents rarely step in to try to show they child an alternative emotional response. They try to smooth all upsets, and will, for instance, use bargaining and bribes to get their child to stop being sad or angry.

*Being contemptuous showing no respect for how the child feels. Such parents are typically disapprovingly harsh in both their criticisms and their punishments. They might for instance, forbid any display of the child’s anger at all, and become punitive as the least sign of irritability. These are parents who angrily yell at a child who is trying to to tell his side of the story, “Don’t you talk back to me!”

The default method of parenting most parents adopt is how they were raised. Unfortunately this propagates many poor parenting methods yielding low emotional intelligence. Effective parenting requires a fairly good grasp of the rudiments of emotional intelligence. Reading Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence” provides the base knowledge, but being emotionally intelligent also requires substantial practice. As will be come apparent, even if parents know what to do, it can be quite demanding.

A child’s readiness for school depends on the most basic of all knowledge, how to learn. A report from the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs makes the point that school success is not predicted by a child’s fund of facts or precocious ability to read so much as by emotions and social measures. The report lists seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity—all related to emotional intelligence.

Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one’s body, behavior, and world; the child’s sense that he is more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes, and that adults will be helpful.
Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is positive and leads to pleasure.
Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is related to a sense of competence, of being effective.
Self-control. The ability to modulate and control one’s own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of inner control.
Relatedness. The ability to engage with others based on the sense of being understood by and understanding others.
Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with others. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of pleasure in engaging with others, including adults.
Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one’s own needs with those of others in group activity.

Two examples of getting the emotional basics follow: one is how to and one is how not to:
“Say a two-month-old baby was up at 3 A.M. and starts crying. Her mother comes in and, for the next half hour, the baby contentedly nurses in her mother’s arms while her mother gazes at her affectionately, telling her that she’s happy to see her, even in the middle of the night. The baby, content in her mother’s love, drifts back to sleep.”
“Now a comparable baby, who also awoke crying in the wee hours, is met instead by a mother who is tense and irritable, having fallen asleep just an hour before after a fight with her husband. The baby starts to tense up the moment his mother abruptly picks him up, telling him, “Just be quiet—I can’t stand one more thing! Come on, let’s get it over with.” As the baby nurses his mother stares stonily ahead, not looking at him, reviewing her fight with his father, getting more agitated herself as she mulls it over. The baby, sensing her tension, squirms, stiffens, and stops nursing. “That’s all you want?” his mother asks. “Then don’t eat.” With the same abruptness she puts him back in his crib and stalks out, letting him cry until he falls back to sleep exhausted.” Goleman notes, “Of course, most babies get a least a taste of both kinds of interaction. But to the degree that one or the other is typical of how parents treat a child over the years, basic emotional lessons will be imparted about how secure a child is in the world, how effective he feels, and how dependable others are. Erik Erikson put in terms of whether a child comes to feel a “basic trust” or a “basic mistrust.”

All the small exchanges between parent and child have an emotional subtext, and in the repetition of these message over the years children form the core of their emotional outlook and capabilities. A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating and asks her busy mother to help gets one message if the reply is the mother’s clear pleasure at the request and another if it’s a curt “Don’t bother me—I’ve got important work to do.” When such encounters become typical of child and parent, they modify the child’s emotional expectations about relationships. They mold the child’s emotional expectations about the relationships, outlooks that will flavor her functioning in all realms of life for better or worse.

It is clear that a mother loving and wanting a child is key to developing an emotionally intelligent child. This is also true for the father. The absence of this love and desire to have a child, and the absence of a father make this difficult. It is one matter to be pro life, but perhaps more important to be pro quality life.

During the first three or four years of life are a period when the toddler’s brain grows to about two thirds its full size, and evolves in complexity at a greater rate than it ever will again. During this period key kinds of learning take place more readily than later in life—emotional learning foremost among them. During this time severe stress can impair the brain’s learning centers, damaging the intellect.

Child abuse results in the extinction of empathy. Goleman writes that what is perhaps most troubling about abused toddlers is how early they seem to have learned to respond like miniature versions of their own abusive parents. The next post will discuss Trauma and Emotional Relearning.

The title of this post is identical to the title of the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” There are two extreme views regarding the mind and medicine. One view, and it is unfortunate that there are physicians who hold this view, is that there is no relationship between the mind and medicine. The other extreme is that the mind controls all and medicine is unnecessary. Actually, this extreme view is the view adopted by some religions such as Christian Scientists, that prayer and meditation, not the mind, provides the basis for treating all illnesses. As the reader will see, the truth lies somewhere in between.

The truth is that there are links between the immune system and the central nervous system, and the field that studies this, psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) is a leading-edge medical science. It’s name acknowledges the links: psycho, or mind; neuro, for the neuroendocrine system (which subsumes the nervous system and hormone systems); and immunology, for the immune system.

Some surgeons will cancel scheduled surgeries for people who are panicked by the prospect of surgery. Every surgeon knows that people who are extremely scared do terribly in surgery. They bleed too much, they have more infections and complications, and they have a harder time recovering. Patients do much better if they are calm.

A study of anger in heart patients was done at Stanford University Medical School. All the patients in the study had suffered a first heart attack, and the question was whether anger might have a significant impact of some kind on their heart function. While the patients recounted incidents that made them mad, the pumping efficiency of their hearts dropped by 5 percentage points. Some patients showed a drop in pumping efficiency of 7% or greater. This is a range that cardiologists regard as a sign of myocardial ischemia, a dangerous drop in blood to the heart itself.

Another study by Dr. Redford Williams of Duke University found that those physicians who had had the highest scores on a test of hostility while still in medical school were seven times as likely to have died by the age of fifty as were those with low hostility scores. This is a stronger predictor of dying your than were other risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

Anxiety, the distress evoked by life’s pressures, is perhaps the emotion with the greatest weight of scientific evidence connecting it to the onset of sickness and course of recovery. Yale psychologist Bruce McEwen noted a broad spectrum of effects: compromising immune functions to the point that it can speed the metastasis of cancer; increasing vulnerability to viral infections; exacerbating plaque formation leading to atherosclerosis and blood clotting leading to myocardial infarction; accelerating the onset of Type 1 diabetes and the course of Type II diabetes; and worsening or triggering an asthma attack. Stress can also lead to ulceration of the gastrointestinal tract, triggering symptoms in ulcerative colitis and in inflammatory bowel disease. The brain itself is susceptible to the long-term effects of sustained stress, including damage to the hippocampus, and so to memory.

There are also medical costs of depression. In patients with chronic kidney failures who were receiving dialysis, those who were diagnosed with major depression were most likely to die within the following two years; depression was a stronger predictor of death than any medical sign.

Heart disease is also exacerbated by depression. A study of 2832 middle-aged men and women tracked for twelve years, those who felt a sense of nagging despair and hopelessness had a heightened rate of death from heart disease. For the 3% who were most severely depressed, the death rate from heart disease compared to those with no feelings of depression was four times greater.

As there are medical costs to pessimism, there are medical advantages to optimism. For example, 122 men who had their first heart attack were evaluated on their degree of optimism or pessimism. Eight years later, of the 25 most pessimistic men, 21 had died; of the 25 most optimistic, just 6 had died.

There is medical value from relationships. Two decades of research involving more than 37,000 people show that social isolation, the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have close contact—doubles the chance of sickness or death. A 1987 report in “Science” concluded that isolation is as significant to mortality rates as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and and lack of physical exercise. Goleman takes care to note that solitude is not the same as isolation; many people who live on their own or see few friends are content and healthy. Rather, it is the subjective sense of being cut of from people and having no one to turn to that is a medical risk.

Goleman argues that for medicine to enlarge its vision to embrace the impact of emotions, two large implications of the scientific findings must be taken to heart:

HELPING PEOPLE BETTER MANAGE THEIR UPSETTING FEELINGS—ANGER, ANXIETY, DEPRESSION, PESSIMISM, AND LONELINESS IS A FORM OF DISEASE PREVENTION. The data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit. One way to do this that could have broad public-health effects would be to impart most basic emotional intelligence skills to children, so that they become lifelong habits. Another high-payoff preventive strategy would be to teach emotion management to people reaching retirement age, since emotional well-being is one factor that determines whether an older person declines rapidly or thrives. A third target group might be so-called at-risk populations—the very poor, single working mothers, residents of high-crime neighborhoods, and the like—who live under extraordinary pressure day in and day out, and so might do better medically with help in handing the emotional toll of these stresses.
MANY PATIENTS CAN BENEFIT MEASURABLY WHEN THEIR PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS ARE ATTENDED TO ALONG WITH THEIR PURELY MEDICAL ONES. While it is a step toward more humane care when a physician or nurse offers a distressed patient comfort and consolation, more can be done. But emotional care is an opportunity too often out of the way medicine is practiced today; it is a blind spot for medicine. Despite mounting data on the medical usefulness of attending to emotional needs, as well as supporting evidence for connecting between the brain’s emotional center and the immune system, many physicians remain skeptical that their patients’ emotions matter clinically, dismissing the evidence of this as trivial and anecdotal, as “fringe, or worse as the exaggerations of a self-promoting few.

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” A new competitive reality is putting intelligence at a premium in the workplace and in the marketplace. Shoshone Zuboff, a psychologist at Harvard Business School pointed out to Goleman, “corporations have gone though a radical revolution within the 20th century, and with this has come a corresponding transformation of the emotional landscape. There was a long period of managerial domination of the corporate hierarchy when the manipulative, jungle-fighter boss was rewarded. But that rigid hierarchy started breaking down in the 1980s under the twin pressures of globalization and information technology. The jungle fighter symbolizes where the corporation has been; the virtuosic in interpersonal skills is the corporate future.”

All the deleterious effects of agitation on thinking discussed in previous healthy memory blog posts operate in the workplace too: When emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend, learn, or make decisions clearly. One management consultant, likely many management consultants, have said, “Stress makes people stupid.”

A discussion of the importance of emotional intelligence to three issues of the workplace will be presented: being able to air grievances as helpful critiques, creating an atmosphere in which diversity is valued, and networking effectively.

The worst way to motivate someone is through personal attacks rather then complaints that can be acted upon. One of the more common forms of destructive criticism is a generalized statement like “You’re screwing up,” delivered in a harsh, sarcastic, angry tone that provides neither a chance to respond nor any suggestion of how to do things better. The person receiving it feels helpless and angry. From the point of emotional intelligence, such criticism displays an ignorance of feelings it triggers in those who receive it, along with the devastating effect these feelings will have on their motivation, energy, and confidence in doing their work.

This destructive dynamic was found in a survey of managers who were asked to think back to times they blew up at employees and, in the heat of the moment, made a personal attack. The angry attacks had effects much like they would in a married couple: the employees who received them reacted most often by becoming defensive, making excuses, or evading responsibility. Sometimes they stonewalled in that they tried to avoid all contact with the manager who blew up at them. If these employees had been subjected to the emotional microscope of John Gottman used with married couples that was described in the blog post “Intimate Enemies,” they would no doubt have been shown to be thinking the thoughts of innocent victimhood or righteous indignation typical of husbands or wives who feel unfairly attacked. If their physiology were measured, they would probably also display the flooding that reinforces such thoughts. Yet these managers were only further annoyed and provoked by these responses. Goleman suggests that this would be the beginning of a cycle in the business world that ends in the employee quitting or being fired. This is the business equivalent of a divorce.

J.R. Larson, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana, notes that “most problems in an employee’s performance are not sudden. They develop slowly over time. When the boss fails to let his feelings be known promptly, it leads to his frustration building up slowly. Then, one day, he blows up about it. If the criticism had been given earlier on, the employee would have been able to correct the problem. Too often people criticize only when things boil over, when they get too angry to contain themselves. And that’s when they give the criticism in the worst way, in a tone of biting sarcasm, calling to mind a long list of grievances they have kept to themselves, or making threats. Such attacks backfire. They are received as an affront, so the recipient becomes angry in return. It’s the worst way to motivate someone.”

Harry Levinson, who is a psychoanalyst turned corporate consultant, gives the following advice on a critique, which is intricately entwined with the art of praise:

“*Be specific. Pick a significant incident, an event that illustrates a key problem that needs changing or a pattern of deficiency, such as the inability to do certain parts of a job well. It demoralizes people just to hear that they are doing “something” wrong, without knowing what the specifics are so they can change. Focus on the specifics, saying what the person did well, what was done poorly, and how it could be changed. Don’t beat about the bush or be oblique or evasive; it will muddy the real message. This, of course, is akin to the advice to couples about they “XYZ” statement of a grievance: say exactly what the problem is, what’s wrong with it, or how it makes you feel, and what could be changed.”

Levinson points out, “Specificity is just as important for praise as for criticism. I won’t say the vague praise has no effect at all, but it doesn’t have much, and you can’t learn from it.”

“* Offer a solution. The critique, like all useful feedback, should point a way to fix the problem. Otherwise it leaves the recipient frustrated, demoralized, or unmotivated. The critique may open the door to possibilities and alternatives that the person did not realize were there, or simply sensitize her to deficiencies that need attention—but should include suggestions about how to take care of the problem.”

“*Be present. Critiques, like praise, are most effective face to face and in private. People who are uncomfortable giving a criticism—or offering praise—are likely to ease the burden on themselves by doing it as a distance, such as a memo. But this makes communication too impersonal, and robs the person receiving it of an opportunity for a response or clarification.

“* Be sensitive. This is a call for empathy, for being attuned to the impact of what you say and how you say it on the person at the receiving end, Managers who have little empathy are most prone to giving feedback in a hurtful fashion, such as the withering putdown. The net effect of such criticism is destructive: instead of opening the way for a corrective, it creates an emotional backlash of resentment, bitterness, defensiveness, and distance.”

The key to dealing with diversity is to see value in diversity. Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of the United States, if not is greatest strength, is the diversity of its population. It is a country of immigrants coming from many different cultures. Unfortunately, too many people see diversity as a problem or a challenge rather than an opportunity. Efforts to restrict immigration are not only hypocritical, as with the exception of the first Americans, the native Americans, we are all immigrants, but also harmful to our continued growth and productivity. Such people are selfish with the attitude of we’ve got ours, so screw you. They are likely highly prejudiced against people who do not look like them or worship as they do.

Prejudices are a kind of emotional leaning that occurs early in life, making these reactions especially hard to eradicate entirely, even in people who as adults feel it is wrong to hold them. There is a healthy memory blog post, “Implicit versus Explicit Prejudice” which discusses implicit biases. There is also a websitehttps://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ that provides tests for implicit biases. There are tests you can take to measure your implicit bias. Do not be discouraged if you score high on certain biases. These are implicit biases that might well be the result of your experiences and learning when you were young. If your explicit behavior does not reflect any biases, then you can reward yourself for overcoming your biases. However, be very careful. We humans are very good at fooling ourselves, and we have many subterfuges for hiding biases. Moreover, it is irrelevant whether we regard ourselves as being bias free. This judgment is better made by other people, preferably people who are the source of your biases. The bottom line here is to work to rid ourselves of all bias. Bias is bad personally and to our country, and the world. We need to work toward zero tolerance for intolerance.

There is a relationship between diversity and networkingy effectively. Networking effectively entails being knowledgeable about the skills and areas of expertise of your coworkers. Clearly any racial, ethnic,or religious biases will degrade or destroy networking effectively. Peter Drucker, the business maven who coined the term “knowledge worker” noted that with knowledge work, “teams become the work unit rather than the individual himself.” This implies that emotional intelligence, the skills that help people harmonize, are central to networking effectively.

Group intelligence has been discussed in previous healthy memory posts. This idea of a group intelligence comes from the Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg and his graduate student Wendy Williams. They developed this concept when they were seeking to understand why some groups are far more effective than others. When people come together to work as a group, each brings different talents. Goleman writes that “while a group can be no “smarter” than the sum total of all these specific strengths, it can be much dumber if its internal workings don’t allow all of these specific strengths, it can be much dumber if its internal workings don’t allow people to share their strengths.” Although HM certainly agrees with the second part of this statement, he strongly disagrees with the first part. The group can be smarter than the sum of its parts. Synergy is the term to describe this.

The first step in networking effectively is to find as much as you can about potential collaborators. Try to develop personal relationships to learn what they know, what they can do, and what they can contribute. Even if the individual or group does not seem to have relevance, one can invite individuals or groups to meetings to see if they have any ideas as to what they can contribute.

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” Intimate enemies refers to married couples having marital problems. Marital therapists have long noted that by the time a couple finds their way to a therapy office they are in this pattern of engage-withdraw with the husband complaining about her “unreasonable “ demands and outbursts, and the wife lamenting his indifference to what she is saying. In effect, there are two emotional realities in a couple, his and hers. The roots of these emotional differences, although they may be partly biological, can also be traced back to childhood, and to the separate emotional worlds boys and girls inhabit while growing up. One study of children’s friendships found that three-year olds say about half their friends are of the opposite sex; for five-year-olds it’s about 20%, and by age seven almost no boys or girls say they have a best friend of the opposite sex. Until teenagers start dating, these separate universes intersect little.

Boys and girls are taught very different lessons about handling emotions. In general, parents discuss emotions—with the exception of anger—more with their daughters than with their sons. Girls are exposed to more information about emotions than are boys; when parents make up stories to tell their preschool children, they use more emotion words when talking to daughters than to sons. When mothers play with their infants, they display a wider range of emotions to daughters than to their sons; when mothers talk to daughters about feelings, they discuss in more detail the emotional state itself than they do with their sons—though with the sons they go into more detail about the causes and consequences of emotions like anger.

Two researchers who have summarized the research on differences in emotions between the sexes, Leslie Brody and Judith Hall, propose that because girls develop facility with language more quickly than do boys, this leads them to be more experienced at articulating their feelings and more skilled than boys at using words to explore and substitute for emotional reactions such as physical fights. They note “boys, for whom the verbalization of affects is de-emphasized, may become largely unconscious of their emotional states, both in themselves and in others.

At age ten, roughly the same % of girls and boys are overtly aggressive, given to open confrontation when angered. However, by age 13, a telling difference between the sexes emerges: girls become more adept than boys at artful aggressive tactics like ostracism, vicious gossip, and indirect vendettas. By and large, boys simply continue being confrontational when angered, oblivious to these covert strategies. This is just one of the many ways the boys, and later men, are less sophisticated than the opposite sex in emotional skills.

Harvard’s Carol Gilligan notes that differences between boys and girls at play point to a key disparity between the sexes: boys take pride in a lone, tough-minded independence and autonomy, while girls see themselves as part of a web of connectedness. So boys are threatened by anything that might challenge their independence, while girls are more threatened by a rupture in their relationships. Deborah Tannen pointed out in her book “You Just Don’t Understand,” these differing perspectives mean that men and women want and expect very different things out of a conversation, with men content to talk about “things,” while women seek emotional connection.

A psychologist at the University of Texas, Ted Huston, who has studied couples in depth, observes, “To the wives, intimacy means talking things over, especially talking about the relationship itself. By and large, the men don’t understand what their wives want from them. Huston found that during courtship men were much more willing to spend time talking in ways that suited the wish for intimacy of their wives-to-be. But once married, as time went on the men—especially more traditional couples, spent less and less time talking in this way with their wives, finding a sense of closeness simply in doing things like gardening together rather than talking things over. Men tend to be somewhat Pollyannaish about the state of they marriage, while their wives are attuned to the trouble spots.

There are implications of this emotional gender gap for how couples handle the grievances and disagreements that any intimate relationship inevitably spawns. Specific issues such as how often a couple has sex, how to discipline children, or how much debt and savings a couple feels comfortable with are not what makes or breaks a marriage. Rather, it is how a couple discusses such sore points that matter for the fate of their marriage. Simply having reached an agreement about how to disagree is key to marital survival; men and women have to overcome the innate genre differences in approaching rocky emotions. Failing this, couples are vulnerable to emotional rifts that eventually can tear their relationship apart. These rifts are far more likely to develop if one or both partners have certain deficits in emotional intelligence.

John Gottman,a University of Washington psychologist, runs a laboratory that analyses the emotional glue that binds couples together, and the corrosive feelings that can destroy marriages. Couples conversations are videotaped in his laboratory and then subjected to hours of microanalysis designed to reveal the emotional currents at play. This mapping of the faults lines that may lead a couple to divorce makes a convincing case for the crucial role of emotional intelligence in the survival of a marriage. While couples talk sensors record the slightest flux in their physiology, a second-by-second analysis of their facial expressions detects the most fleeting and subtle nuance of feeling. After the session each partner comes separately to the lab and watches a video tape of the conversation, and narrates his or her secret thoughts during the heated moments of the exchange. Dr. Gotten is able to predict which couples will divorce within three years with 94% accuracy.

There are important differences between complaints and personal criticisms. In a complaint, one person states specifically what is upsetting, and criticizes the other’s action, not the person, about how it made the person feel. “When you forgot to pick up my clothes at the cleaner’s it made me feel like you don’t care about me.” This is an expression of basic emotional intelligence: assertive, not belligerent or passive. But in a personal criticism the grievance is used to launch a global attack on the person. For example, “You’re always so selfish and uncaring. It just proves I can’t trust you to do anything right.” This kind of criticism leaves the person on the receiving end feeling ashamed, disliked, blamed, and defective—all of which are more likely to lead to a defensive response than to steps to improve things.

The two arms of the fight-or-flight response each represents ways a spouse can respond to an attack. The most obvious is to fight back, lashing out in anger. That route typically ends in a fruitless shouting match. But the alternative response, fleeing, can be more pernicious, particularly when the “flight” is a retreat into stony silence. Stonewalling is the ultimate defense. The stonewaller just goes blank, in effect withdrawing from the conversation by responding with a stony expression and silence. Stonewalling showed up mainly in marriages that were heading for trouble; in 85% of these cases it was the husband who stonewalled in response to a wife who attacked with criticism and contempt. As a habitual response stonewalling is devastating to the health of a relationship: it cuts off all possibility of working out disagreements.

Gotten uses the term “flooding’ for the susceptibility to frequent emotional distress: Flooded husbands or wives are so overwhelmed by their partner’s negativity and their own reaction to it that they are swamped by dreadful, out-of-control feelings. People who are flooded cannot hear without distortion or respond with clear-headedness; they find it hard to organize their thinking and fall back on primitive reactions. They want things to stop, or to run or, sometimes to strike back. Flooding is a self-perpetuating emotional highjacking.

The technical description of flooding is in terms of heart rate rise from calm levels. At rest, the women’s heart rates are about 82 beats per minute, men’s about 72. Flooding begins at about 10 beats per minute above a person’s resting rate; if the heart reaches 100 beats per minute (as it can easily do during moments of rage or tears), then the body is pumping adrenaline and other hormones that keep distress high for some time. The moment of emotional highjacking is apparent from the heart rate: it can jump 10, 20, or even as many as 30 beats per minute within the space of a single heartbeat. Muscles tense; it can seem hard to breathe. There is a swamp of toxic feelings, an unpleasant wash of fear and anger that seems inescapable. This is clearly a dangerous point for a marriage.

Men are the vulnerable sex. Women, on average, do not mind plunging into the unpleasantness of a marital squabble nearly so much as do the men in their lives. Husbands are prone to flooding at a lower intensity of negativity than are their wives. More men than women react to they spouse’s criticism with flooding. Once flooding, husbands secrete more adrenaline into their bloodstream, and their adrenaline flow is triggered by lower levels of negativity on their wife’s part; it takes husbands longer to recover from flooding.

Men are more likely to be stonewallers and women are more likely to criticize their husbands in their assumed roles as emotional managers. There seems to be a fundamental incapability here. So what can be done?

In general, men and women need different emotional fine-tuning. For men, the advice is not to sidestep conflict, but to realize that when their wife brings up some grievance or disagreement, she may be doing it as an act of love trying to keep the relationship healthy and on course (but there may be other motives here). When grievances simmer, they build and build in intensity until there’s an explosion: when they are aired and worked out, it takes the pressure off. But husbands need to realize that anger or discontent is not synonymous with personal attack—their wives emotions are often simply underlines, emphasizing the strength of feelings about the matter.

Men also need to be on guard again short-circuiting the discussion by offering a practical solution too early on—it’s typically more important to a wife that she feel her husband hears her complaining and empathizes with her feelings. Neither party should make personal attacks.

When discussions or arguments become heated, it might be wise to agree to break off the discussion or argument now, and to resume it at a later time.

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” Before developing interpersonal skills, toddlers must first reach a benchmark of self-control, the beginnings of the capacity to damp down their own anger and distress, their impulses and excitement—even if that ability usually falters. Attunement to others demands a modicum of calm in oneself. Tentative signs of the ability to manage their emotions emerge around this same time: toddlers begin to be able to wait without wailing, to argue or cajole to get their way rather than using brute force—even if they don’t always choose to use this ability. At least occasionally, patience emerges as an alternative to tantrums. Signs of empathy emerge by age two. Handling emotion in someone else, the fine art of relationships, requires the ripeness of two other emotional skills, self-management and empathy.

People skills are the social competences that make for effectiveness in dealings with others. Deficits lead to ineptness in the social world or repeated interpersonal disasters. It is precisely the lack of these skills that can cause even the brightest to founder in their relationships. They come off as arrogant, obnoxious, or insensitive. Goleman concludes, “These social abilities allow one to shape an encounter, to mobilize and inspire others, to thrive in intimate relationships, to persuade and influence, to put others at ease.”

Emotions are contagious. Goleman writes, “We transmit and catch moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing. This emotional exchange is typically at a subtle almost imperceptible level; the way a salesperson says thank you can leave us feeling ignored, resented, or genuinely welcome and appreciated. We catch feelings from one another as though they were some kind of social virus.”

Goleman continues, “We send emotional signals in every encounter, and those signals affect whom we are with. The more adroit we are socially, the better we control the signals we send; the reserve of polite society is, after all simply means to ensure that no disturbing emotional leakage will unsettle the encounter (a social rule that, when brought into the domain of intimate relationships, is stifling). Emotional intelligence includes managing this exchange; ‘popular’ and ‘charming’ are terms we use for people whom we like to be with because their emotional skills make us feel good. People who are able to help others soothe their feelings have an especially valued social commodity; they are the souls others turn to when in greatest emotional need. We are all part of each other’s tool kit for emotional change, for better or worse.”

In a simple experiment two volunteers filled out a check list about their moods of the moment, then simply sat facing each other quietly while waiting for an experimenter to return to the room. Two minutes later the experimenter came back and asked them to fill out a mood checklist again. The pairs were purposely composed of one partner who was highly expressive of emotion and one who was deadpan. Invariably the mood of one who was more expressive of emotions had been transferred to the more passive partner.

Here’s how Goleman explains this transmission. “The most likely answer is that we unconsciously imitate the emotions we see displayed by someone else, through an out-of-awareness motor mimicry of their facial expression, gestures, tone of voice, and other nonverbal markers of emotion. Through this imitation people re-create in themselves the mood of the other person—a low -key version of the Stanislavsky method, in which actors recall gestures, movements, and other expressions of an emotion they have felt strongly in the past in order to evoke those feelings again.”

The degree of emotional rapport people feel in an encounter is mirrored by how tightly coordinated their physical movements are as the talk. This index of closeness it typically out of awareness. One person nods as the other makes a point. Or they both shift their chairs at the same moment, or one leans forward as the other moves back. This synchrony seems to facilitate the sending and receiving of moods, even when the moods are negative. In one study of physical synchrony, women who were depressed came to a laboratory with their romantic partners and discussed a problem in their relationship. The more synchrony between the partners at the nonverbal level, the worse the depressed women’s partners felt after the discussion. They had caught their girlfriend’s bad moods. So, whether people feel upbeat or down, the more physically attuned their encounter, the more similar their moods will become.

Psychologists Hatch and Gardner have identified the following four separate abilities as components of interpersonal intelligence:

*Organizing groups—the essential skill of the leader, this involves initiating and coordinating the efforts of a network of people. This is the talent seen in theater directors or producers, in military officers, and in effective heads of organizations and units of all kinds. On the playground, this is the child who takes the lead in deciding what everyone will play, or becomes team captain.

*Negotiating solutions—the talent of the mediator, presenting conflicts or resolving those that flare up. People who have this ability excel in deal-making, in arbitrating or mediating disputes; they might have a career in diplomacy, in arbitration or law, or as middlemen of managers of takeovers. These are the kids who settle arguments on the playing field.

*Personnel connection—the talent of empathy and connecting. This makes it easy to enter into an encounter or to recognize and respond fittingly to people’s feelings and concerns—the art of relationship. Such people make good “team players,” dependable spouses, good friends or business partners; in the business world they do well as salespeople or managers, or can be excellent teachers. Children get along well with virtually everyone else, easily enter into playing with them, and are happy doing so. These children tend to be best art reading emotions from facial expression and are most liked by their classmates.

*Social analysis—being able to detect and have insights about people’s feelings, motives, and concerns. This knowledge of how others feel can lead to an easy intimacy or sense of rapport. At its best, this ability makes one a competent therapist or counselor—or if combined with some literary talent, a gifted novelist or dramatist.

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” Empathy builds on self-awareness. The more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading feelings. Empathy comes into play in a vast array of life arenas, from sales and management, to romance and parenting, to compassion and political action. Its lack is seen in criminal psychopaths, rapists, and child molesters.

Robert Rosenthal, a Harvard psychologist, and his students devised a test of empathy, the PONS (Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity), a series of videotapes of a young woman expressing feelings ranging from loathing to motherly love. The scenes range from a jealous rage to asking forgiveness, from a show of gratitude to seduction. The video has been edited so that in each portrayal one or more channels of nonverbal communication are systematically blanked out; in addition to having the words muffled, in some scenes all other cues but the facial expression are blocked. In others, only the body movements are shown, and so on, through the main nonverbal channels of communication, so the viewers have to detect emotion from one or another specific nonverbal cue.

The tests of over seven thousand people in the United States and eighteen other countries, the benefits of being able to read feelings from nonverbal cues included being better adjusted emotionally, more popular, more outgoing, and—perhaps not surprisingly—more sensitive. Generally speaking women are better than men at this kind of empathy. People whose performance improved over the course of the 45 minute test—a sign that they have a talent for picking up empathy skills—had better relationships with the opposite sex. It should be no surprise that empathy helps with romantic life.

Empathy is independent from academic intelligence. In tests with 1,011 children, those who showed an aptitude for reading feelings nonverbally were among the most popular in their schools, and the most emotionally stable. They also did better in school even though on average their IQs were not higher than other students. Apparently high empathic ability smooths the way for classroom (or simply makes teachers like them more).

Developmental psychologists have found that infants feel sympathetic distress even before they fully realize that they exist apart from other people. Just a few months after birth, infants react to disturbances in those around them as though they were their own, crying when they see another child’s tears. After one year or so, they start to realize the misery is not their own, but someone else’s.

Eventually toddlers begin to diverge from one another in their overall sensitivity to other people’s emotional upsets. Research has shown that a large part of the difference in empathic concern had to do with how parents disciplined their children. Children were more empathetic when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress their misbehaving caused someone else. They also found that children’s empathy is also shaped by seeing how others react when someone else is distressed; by imitating what they see, children develop a repertoire of empathic response, especially in helping other people who are distressed.

Psychiatrist Daniel Stern is fascinated by the small repeated exchanges that take place between parent and child. He believes that the most basic lessons of emotional life are laid down in these intimate moments. Of all such moments, the most critical are those that let the child know her emotions are met with empathy, accepted, and reciprocated, in a process Stern calls attunement.

Prolonged absence of attunement between parent and child takes a tremendous emotional toll on the child. When a parent consistently fails to show any empathy with a particular range of emotions in the child—joys, tears, needing to cuddle—the child begins to avoid expressing, and perhaps even feeling, the same emotions.

The lifetime emotional costs of a lack of attunement in childhood can be great—and not just for the child. A study of criminals who committed the cruelest and most violent crimes found that the one characteristic of their early lives that sent them apart from other criminals was that they had been shuttled from foster home to foster home or raised in orphanages. These life histories suggest emotional neglect and little opportunity for attunement.

The following comes from a section in the chapter titled ‘LIFE WITHOUT EMPATHY:THE MIND OF THE MOLESTER, THE MORALS OF THE SOCIOPATH
“A psychological fault line is common to rapists, child molesters, and many perpetrators of family violence alike; they are incapable of empathy. This inability to feel their victim’s pain allows them to tell themselves lies that encourage their crime. For rapists, the lieu include “Women really want to get raped” or “If she resists, she’s just playing hard to get;” for molesters, “I’m not hurting the child, just showing love” or “This is just another form of affection;” for physically abusive parents, “This is just good discipline.”

On the other hand, empathy provides the roots for altruism and ethics. This underscores research showing that the most important relationship for a child is its relationship with its mother. The mother needs to want and love the child. The absence of this desire and love bodes ill for the future of the child. Delinquency, criminal behavior, drug abuse, and children who live purposeless live are the result. These are lost lives. Rather than pro-life, the goal should be pro-quality life. Unless a loving substitute is found, an abortion is likely beneficial for the child. A merciful God would save the soul of the child for a loving and caring mother.

Passion’s Slaves is the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” Since the time of Plato a sense of self-mastery, of being able to withstand the emotional storms that the buffeting of Fortune brings rather than being “passion’s slave,” has been praised as a virtue. The ancient Greek word for it was “sophrosyne.” Page DuBois, a Greek scholar translates it as “care and intelligence in conducting one’s life; a tempered balance and wisdom.” The Romans and the early Christian church called it “temperantia”, temperance, the restraining of emotional excess. The goal is balance, not emotional suppression. Aristotle observed, what is wanted is appropriate emotion, feeling proportionate to circumstance. The passions discussed in this post are anger and rage, worry and anxiety, and depression and melancholy.

Anger and Rage

The design of the brain means that we very often have little or no control over when we are swept by emotion, nor over what emotion it will be. However, we can have some say on how long an emotion will last. Consider the anatomy of rage. Say you are cut off in traffic by a driver. You think, “He could have hit me! That bastard—I can’t let him get away with that!” Your knuckles whiten as you tighten your hold on the steering wheel, which you regard as a surrogate for strangling his throat. You body mobilizes to fight not run—leaving you trembling, beads of sweat on your forehead, your heart pounding, the muscles in your face locked in a scowl.”

Compare that sequence of building rage with a more charitable line of thought toward the driver who cut you off. “Maybe he didn’t see me, or maybe he had some good reason for driving so carelessly, such as a medical emergency.” Such thoughts tempers anger with mercy or at least an open mind, short-circuiting the buildup of rage. Aristotle’s challenge is to have only appropriate anger reminds us, is that more often than not, our anger surges out of control. Benjamin Franklin put it well: “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.” There are different kinds of anger. The amygdala is a main source of the sudden spark of rage we feel at the driver whose carelessness endangers us. On the other end of emotional circuitry, the neocortex, most likely foments more calculated angers, such as cool-headed revenge or outrange at unfairness or injustice.

Rage seems to be the most intransigent of al the moods. Researcher Diana Tice found that anger is the mood people are worst at controlling. Anger is the most seductive of the negative emotions; the self-righteous inner monologue that propels it along fills the mind with the most convincing arguments for venting range. Unlike sadness, anger is energizing, even exhilarating. Anger’s persuasive power might explain why some views about it are so common: that anger is uncontrollable, or that it should not be controlled, and venting anger in “catharsis” is to the good. A contrasting view holds that anger can be prevented entirely. However, a careful reading of research findings suggests that all these common attitudes toward anger are misguided if not outright myths.

The train of angry thoughts that stokes anger is also potentially the key to one of the most powerful ways to defuse anger: undermining the convictions that are fueling the anger in the first case. The longer we ruminate about what has made us angry, the more “good reasons” and self-justification for being angry we can event. Brooding just fuels anger’s flames. Seeing things differently douses those flames. Tice found that reframing a situation more positively was one of the most potent ways to put anger to rest. Timing matters. The earlier in the anger cycle, the more effective. Anger can be completely short-circuited if the mitigating information comes before the anger is acted on.

The second way of de-escalating anger is cooling off physiologically by waiting out the adrenal surge in a setting where there are not likely to be further triggers for rage. This is a common way of dealing with anger according to Tice’s research. One such fairly effective strategy is going off to be alone while cooling down. People go for a drive or a walk. Of these two, the second is preferable. Exercise also works. Relaxation methods such as deep breathing and muscle relaxation, perhaps because they change the body’s physiology from the high arousal of anger to a low-arousal state, and perhaps too because they distract from whatever triggered the anger. [enter “Relaxation Response” into the search block of the healthy memory blog to find relevant posts].

However, a cooling-down period will not work if that time is used to pursue the train of anger-inducing thought, since each such though will trigger more cascades of anger.

Distractions like TV, movies, reading and the like work, but not shopping or eating.

Ventilation does not work. In fact there is a ventilation fallacy. Ventilation may feel satisfying, but it is counterproductive. Tice found that ventilating anger is one of the worst ways to cool down: outbursts of rage typically pump up the emotional brain’s arousal, leaving people feeling more angry not less.

Worry and Anxiety

Worrying is at the heart of all anxiety. The reaction that underlies worry is the vigilance for potential for potential danger that has, no doubt been essential for survival over the course of evolution. When fear triggers the emotional brain, part of the resulting anxiety fixates attention on the threat at hand, thus forcing the mind to obsess about how to handle it and ignore anything else. Worry is a rehearsal of what might go wrong and how to deal with it. The purpose of worrying is to come up with positive solutions for life’s perils by anticipating dangers before they arise.

Worrying becomes a problem with chronic repetitive worries that go on and on never getting nearer to a positive solution. Goleman writes that a “close analysis of chronic worry suggests that it has all the attributes of a low-grade emotional hijacking. Worries that seem to come from nowhere and are uncontrollable generate a study hum of anxiety, are impervious to reason and lock the worrier into a single, inflexible view of the topic of worry. When this cycle of worry intensifies and persists, it crosses over the line into a full-blown neural hijacking, the anxiety disorders: phobias, obsessions and compulsions, panic attacks.

For each disorder worry fixates in a distinct fashion: phobic anxieties rivet on the feared situation; obsessive disorders fixate on preventing some feared calamity; panic attacks can focus on fear of dying or on the prospect of having the anxiety attack itself.

Researchers have observed that anxiety comes in two forms: cognitive, or worrisome thoughts, and somatic, the physiological symptoms of anxiety, like sweating, a racing heart, or muscle tension. Insomniacs are suffering from anxiety attacks. Their main problem preventing them from sleeping were intrusive thoughts. No matter how sleepy they were, they could not stop worrying. The one technique that worked in helping them get to sleep was getting their minds off their worries, focusing instead on the sensations produced by a relaxation method. In summary, the worries could be stopped by shifting attention away.

Unfortunately, most worriers seem unable to do this. These worriers get a partial payoff from worrying that reinforces the habit. It seems that there is something positive in worries: worries are ways to deal with potential threats. When the work of worrying succeeds, it is to rehearse what those dangers are, and to reflect on ways to deal with them. But Goleman writes that worry doesn’t work that well. “New solutions and fresh ways of seeing a problem do not typically come from worrying, especially chronic worry. Instead of coming up with solutions to these potential problems, worriers typically simply ruminate on the danger itself, immersing themselves in a low-key way in the dread associated with it while staying in the same run of thought. Chronic worriers worry about a wide range of things, most of which have almost no chance of happening; they read dangers into life’s journey that others never notice.”

Still chronic worriers report that worrying helps them, and that their worries are self-perpetuating. So why should worry become what seems to amount to a mental addiction? Borkovec notes that the worry habit is reinforcing in the same sense that superstitions are. Since people worry about many things that have a very low probability of actually occurring, to the primitive limbic brain there appears to be something magical about it. “Like an amulet that wards off some anticipated evil, the worry psychologically gets the credit for preventing the danger it obsesses about.”

Borkovic discovered simple steps the can help even the most chronic worrier control the habit.

The first step is self-awareness, catching the worrisome episodes as near their beginning as possible. Borkovec trains people in this approach by first teaching them to monitor cues for anxiety, especially learning to identify situations that trigger worry, or the fleeting thoughts and images that initiate the worry, as well as the accompanying sensation of anxiety in the body. With practice people can identify the worries at an earlier and earlier point in the anxiety spiral. People also learn relaxation methods that they can apply at the moment they recognize the worry beginning, and practice the relaxation method daily so they will be able to use it on the spot. [Much has been written about relaxation in the healthy memory blog. Enter ‘relaxation’ into search block of the healthy memory blog.]

Goleman offers the following precaution: “for people with worries so severe they have flowered into phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or paid disorder, it may be prudent—indeed a sign of self-awareness—to turn to medication to interrupt the cycle A retraining of the emotional circuitry through therapy is still called for, however, in order to lessen the likelihood that anxiety disorders will recur when medication is stopped.

Melancholy and Depression

The single mood people put most effort into shaking is sadness: Tice found that people are most inventive when it comes to trying to escape the blues. Melancholy like every other mood has its benefits. The sadness that a loss brings has certain effects: it closes down our interest in divisions and pleasures, focuses attention on what’s been lost, and saps our energy for starting new endeavors, hopefully for the time being. It causes a reflective retreat from life’s pursuits, and leaves us in a state to mourn the loss, mull over its meaning, and make the psychological adjustments and new plans to continue with out lives.

Although bereavement is useful, a full-blown depression is not. In a major depression, love is paralyzed: no new beginnings emerge. The very symptoms of severe depression place a life on hold. For most people psychotherapy can help as can medication.

The far more common sadness that at its upper limits becomes a “subclinical depression” is sometimes referred to as melancholy. This is a range of despondency that people can handle on their own, if they have the internal resources. Unfortunately, some of the strategies most often resorted to can backfire, leaving people feeling worse than before. One such strategy is staying alone. However, more often than not this only adds a sense of loneliness and isolation to the sadness.

Tice found the most popular tactic for battling depression is socializing. Going out to eat, to a ball game or movie. Doing something with friends or family. This works well if the effect is to get the person’s mind off his sadness.

One of the main determinants of whether a depressed mood will persist or lift is the degree to which people ruminate. Worrying about what’s depressing us seems to make the depression all the more intense and prolonged. In depression, worry takes several forms, all focusing on some aspect of the depression itself, such as how tired we feel, how little energy or motivation we have, or how little work we’re getting done. Typically this reflection is not accompanied by any concrete course of action that might alleviate the problem.

Cognitive therapy aimed at changing these thought patterns has been found in some studies to be on a pair with medication for treating mild clinical depression, and superior to medication in preventing the return of mild depression. Two strategies are particularly effective. One is to learn to challenge the thoughts at the center of rumination. The other is to purposely schedule pleasant, distracting events.

Tice found that aerobic exercise is one of the more effective tactics for lifting mild depression, as well as other bad moods. A caveat here is that the mood-lifting benefits of exercise work best for the lazy, those who don’t work out very much. For those with a daily exercise routine there is a reverse effect on mood: they start to feel bad on those days when they skip their workout. Exercise seems to work well because it changes the physiological state the mood evolves: depression is a low-arousal state, and aerobics pitches the body into high arousal. Relaxation techniques, which put the body into a low-arousal state work for anxiety, a high-arousal state, but not so well for depression.

Tice reports that a more constructive approach to mood-lifting is engineering a small triumph or easy success: tackling some long-delayed chore around the house of getting to some other duty they’ve been wanting to clear up. Lifts to self-image were also cheering, even if only in the form of getting dressed up or putting makeup.

One of the most potent antidotes is cognitive reframing. For example, stepping back and thinking about the ways a relationship wasn’t so great, and ways you and your partner were mismatched, seeing the loss in a more positive light is an antidote to sadness.

This post offers some tips for dealing with emotional problems. Should problems persist and become chronic, please see professional help. Should you ever fear that you are a danger to yourself or others, SEEK PROFESSIONAL HELP IMMEDIATELY. If necessary, go to an emergency room.

Know Thyself is the title of a chapter in Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence.” Since that chapter was written, there have been significant advances in the study of the emotions, some of which have been reported in this blog. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book “How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain” was revolutionary. Relevant blog posts can be found by entering “Lisa Feldman Barrett” into the search box of the healthy memory blog. The following is taken directly from the post “How Emotions Are Made”:

Dr. Barrett calls this view the theory of constructed emotions. These emotions are constructed on the basis of our interoceptive environments. She presents a convincing argument that our emotions are built upon our interpretation of our internal environments, that is analogous to the manner in which we develop an understanding of the external world.

Readers of the healthy memory blog should be aware that we do not experience the external world directly. Rather we develop concepts and models on the basis of what our senses receive from the external world. In other words, emotions are based on what we feel, that is how we interpret what we receive from our interoceptive environment. Emotions are interpretations of our interoceptive conditions. In other words we learn our emotional concepts in an analogous manner to how we learn about the external world. We have an energy budget and this budget affects feelings of hunger and other bodily conditions.

Dr. Barrett provides a personal anecdote to illustrate how constructed emotions work. When she was a graduate student a fellow male graduate student asked her out at the end of the day. Although she had no feelings for this guy, she was tired and thought it would be a good way to kill the evening. While they were dining, she thought she was beginning to fall for him. Nothing further happened and she went home and fell asleep exhausted. The next morning she woke up with the flu and remained in bed for several more days. Apparently she had misinterpreted her interoceptive environment. What she had originally interpreted as incipient feelings of love, were really incipient feelings of the flue virus.

After that relevant digression, we return to Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence.”

Metamood is a term psychologists use to refer to awareness of one’s emotions, and metacognition refers refers to an awareness of thought process. Self-awareness is not an attention that gets carried away by emotions, overreacting and amplifying what is perceived. Instead, it is a neutral mode that maintains self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions. The awareness of emotions is the fundamental emotional competence on which others, such as emotional self-control. build. Self-awareness means being “aware of both our mood and our thoughts about the mood.” Self-awareness can be nonjudgmental or judgmental to include, “I shouldn’t feel this way,” “I’m thinking good things to cheer up,” or “Don’t think about it.”

The psychologist John Mayer describes three distinctive styles for attending to and dealing with their emotions.

*Self-aware. Aware of their moods as they are having them, these people understandably have some sophistication about their emotional lives. Their clarity about emotions may undergird other personality traits: they are autonomous and sure of their own boundaries, are in good psychological health, and tend to have a positive outlook on life. When they get into a bad mood, they don’t ruminate and obsess about it, and are able to get out of it sooner. In short, their mindfulness helps them manage their emotions.

*Engulfed. These are people who often feel swamped by their emotions and helpless to escape them, as though their moods have taken charge. They are mercurial and not very aware of their feelings, so that they are lost in them rather than having some perspective. As a result, they do little to try to escape bad moods, feeling that they have no control over their emotional life. They feel overwhelmed and emotionally out of control. Such people definitely need to practice mindfulness and meditation, and perhaps consider seeking professional help.

*Accepting. While these people are often clear about what they are feeling, they also tend to be accepting of their moods, and so don’t try to change them. There seem to be two branches of the accepting type: those who are usually in good moods and so have little motivation to change them, and people who, despite the clarity about their moods, are susceptible to bad ones but accept them with a laissez-faire attitude, doing nothing to change them despite their distress—a pattern found among, say, depressed people who are resigned to despair. This latter group should be aware that there are techniques for changing and controlling their moods, should they want to.

It is possible not to have feelings. Psychiatrists call it alexithymia. These people lack words for their feelings. They seem to lack feelings altogether, although this may actually be because of they inability to express emotion rather than from an absence of emotion altogether.

Although no one can as yet say for sure what causes alexithymia, Dr. Sifneos, who coined the term, proposes a disconnection between the limbic system and the neocortex, particularly its verbal centers, which fits well with what we are learning about the emotional brain.

Obvious questions here are what does the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) lack and what does Emotional Intelligence include. In his book “Emotional Intelligence” Goleman asks, “What factors are at play, for example, when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well?” He argues that “the difference quite often lies in the abilities called here emotional intelligence, which include self-control, zeal, and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself. And these skills, as we shall see, can be taught to children, given them a better chance to use whatever intellectual potential the genetic lottery may have given them.”

Goleman goes on to argue that a pressing moral imperative lies beyond this possibility, noting that there are times when the fabric of society seems to unravel at ever-greater speed, when selfishness, violence, and meanness of spirit seem to be rotting the goodness of our communal lives. The importance of emotional intelligence hinges upon the link between sentiment, character and moral instincts. Goleman argues that there is growing evidence that fundamental ethical stances in life stem from underlying emotional capacities. Impulse, for one, is the medium of emotion; the seed of all impulses is a feeling bursting to express itself in action. Those at the mercy of impulse, lacking self-control, suffer a moral deficiency. “The ability to control impulse is the base of will and character. By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy, the ability to read emotions in others; lacking a sense of another’s need or despair, there is no caring. And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.”

So what are emotions for? Sociobiologists point to the preeminence of heart over head when they conjecture why evolution has given emotion such a central role in the human psyche. They say that our emotions guide us in facing predicaments and tasks too important to leave to intellect alone such as danger, painful loss, persisting toward a goal despite frustrations, bonding with a mate, building a family. Sociobiologists say that each emotion offers a distinctive readiness to act; each points us in a direction that has worked well to handle the recurring challenges of human life. These eternal situations were repeated and repeated over our evolutionary history. The survival value of our emotional repertoire was attested to by its becoming imprinted in our nerves as innate, automatic tendencies of the human heart.

Goleman writes, “A view of human nature that ignores the power of emotions is sadly shortsighted. The very name “Homo sapiens,” the thinking species, is misleading in light of the new appreciation and visit the place of emotions in our lives that science now offers. As we all know from experience, when it comes to shaping our decisions and actions, feeling counts every bit as much—and often more—than thought. We have gone too far in emphasizing the value and import of the purely rational—of what IQ measures—in human life. For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when the emotions hold sway.”

HM needs to apologize to his readers. “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ” by Daniel Goleman was published more than 20 years ago. HM did not read it because he was already convinced of the title that emotional intelligence can matter more than IQ. Moreover, HM would have gone further and argued that in most cases emotional intelligence matters more than IQ. A tenth anniversary edition was published in 2005, but HM still didn’t read it.

HM has finally read it and has discovered that the research on emotional intelligence is very rich, and that he was not adequately familiar with it. Moreover, there is much information and many tips as to how one can improve emotional intelligence. The healthy memory blog has many posts on mindfulness and meditation. These are essential for gaining control of one’s attention and emotions. However, these are general exercises. Emotional intelligence has much information as to how one can improve one’s own emotional intelligence, and how emotional intelligence can be fostered among fellow humans.

HM will do his very best to disseminate as much useful information as he can in his posts. However, he realizes that he is not up to this, and although he will do his best, he will still fall short of the mark. So he strongly recommends that you get this book and read it for yourself. Moreover, this is not a book to read and then set aside. It needs to be studied continuously throughout one’s life.

These frequently repeating shooting incidents that are occur throughout the United States and its schools are very worrisome. Coverage of these events is extensive, and solutions have been offered, but HM has yet to hear emotional intelligence in these discussions. This is unfortunate as emotional intelligence is of special importance.

To make this point, please indulge HM in relating a bit of personal history. In the fourth grade, he had many friends, but one was quite special and he spent many free hours together and with others. However, when they moved into the fifth grade they somehow became estranged. Two former close friends became enemies. Enemies to the extent that HM engaged in one of only a few fights. This occurred on the school ground after school. HM was winning at the beginning of the fight, but his former friend eventually achieved the advantage. Fortunately for HM, at this point a teacher intervened and stopped the fight. They remained estranged. It was not until many, many years later that HM asked himself why his friend had changed. HM started to think that perhaps his friend’s family was having problems such as his parents breaking up that caused the change in his personality, and that he had failed to realize this and had failed to come to his assistance. Rather than offering help, he became an enemy and ended up fighting.

At these shooting incidents the mental status of the shooter is at issue. The lack of emotional intelligence is never mentioned. There are likely many others at school, who are short on emotional intelligence and who are leading destructive lives. Then there are the remaining students, faculty, and staff who should witness events and note how certain students are being excluded. So it is not just one individual, but an entire school system that could do with some training and instruction in emotional intelligence. Increases in emotional intelligence will also benefit individuals in helping them live more enjoyable productive lives.

So many posts will follow, but it is still strongly recommended that you purchase, read, and continue to study Goleman’s outstanding work on emotional intelligence.

That is from the book written for the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman, “A FORCE FOR GOOD: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for Our World.” Five healthy memory blog posts have already been written. Several more months could be spent on posts summarizing more wisdom from the book. Instead chapter titles and headings from the remainder of the book will be written here in the hope that they will persuade to you read the book on your own.

The first two parts, that have been reviewed are titled Part One: A World Citizen and Part Two: Looking Inward.

Part Three is titled Looking outward
Representative titles and headings follow;
Compassion Takes Action
Constructive Anger
The Strength of Altruism
The Empathy Gap
Structural Unfairness
Impeccability
Economics as if People Mattered
Rethinking Economics
The Secret of Happiness
Action for Happiness
Doing Good While Doing Well
Care for Those in Need
Helping People Help Themselves
Self-Mastery
Women as Leaders
Barefoot College
Heal the Earth
Radical Transparency
Trade-offs, Innovations—and Education
Rethinking Every Thing
How Did That Get Here?
A Century of Dialogue
Beyond Us and Them
The Power of Truth
Harmony Among Religions
Toward a Century of Dialogue
Put-Ups and Win-Wins
Educate the Heart
Mind Training
Reinventing Education
Social and Emotional Learning
A Call to Care
Part Four is titled Looking Back, Looking Ahead
The Long View
Are Things Getting Better or Worse?
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Thinking in New Ways
A Theory of Change
Plant the Seeds for a Better World
Act Now
Take It to Scale
The Human Connection
Think, Plan, Act

The title of this post is identical to a chapter in “A FORCE FOR GOOD: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for our World” has been written for the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman. The Dalai Lama sees science as but one way of grasping reality, limited by its methodologies and assumptions, like another way of knowing. The Dalai Lama said, “Scientists themselves have emotions that create problems. If we get helpful finding from science about how to create greater well-being and lessen destructive emotions, it’s more convincing and it will also help the scientists.

When Goleman was a pre-doctoral traveling fellow in South Asia, he studied a fifth-century text that provided a sampling of “ancient Indian psychology.” He was amazed at the precision with which this text delineated specific methods to shift our emotional and mental states (not to mention achieving transcendental states, which even today are largely off psychology’s map in the West.) So it is not only the Buddhist religion that offers relevant practices for western psychology, but eastern psychology itself has valuable science for the west.

The Dalai Lama has met many distinguished scientists on his visits to the West, and there have been many western scientists who have traveled to India to meet the Dalai Lama.

When Kiley Hamlin, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia was showing the Dalai Lama a video of a three-month-old preferring a nicer triangle (the triangle was shown as being nicer in the video) to the mean square (which was shown as being a meanie in the video). She concluded, “The very young already like goodness and enjoy being helpful and compassionate.”

Although pleased the Dalai Lama did not take this presentation uncritically. The Dalai Lama responded, “Thinking in terms of statistics, you’ve shown only one child. That is the average response?”

Hamlin reassured him that this test had been replicated with hundreds of children and in cultures around the world.

The Dalai Lama nodded in approval—but still queried, “And was their economic level taken into account?

Hamlin confirmed that they had found the same in children from poorer families and from wealthy ones.

In addition to his travels to meet scientists in the west, regular conferences are held at the Dalai Lama’s residence in India where scientists present their research to the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama says that he’s collecting “ammunition,” findings to support his message in his public talks—and with the press.

The Dalai Lama envisions a force for good. That force begins by countering the energies within the human mind that drive our negativity. To change the future and not repeat the past, The Dalai Lama tells us, we need need to transform our own minds—weaken the pull of our destructive emotions to strengthen our better natures.

Absent that inner shift, we remain vulnerable to knee-jerk reactions like rage, frustration, and hopelessness. These only lead us to the same old forlorn paths.

With a positive inner shift, we can more naturally embody concern for others—and so act with compassion, the core of moral responsibility. The Dalai Lama says that this prepares us to enact a larger mission with new clarity, calm, and caring. We can tackle intractable problems, like corrupt decision-makers and tuned out elites, greed and self-interest as giving motives, the indifference of the powerful to the powerless.

By beginning this social revolution inside our own minds, the Dalai Lama’s vision aims to avoid the blind alleys of past movements for the better. He cites the message of George Orwell’s cautionary parable “Animal Farm:” how greed and lust for power corrupted the “utopias” which were supposed to overthrow despots and help everyone equally, but in the end re-created the power imbalances and injustices of the very past they were supposed to have eradicated.

The Dalai Lama sees that the seeds we plant today can change the course of our shared tomorrow. Some may bring immediate fruits others may only be harvested by generations yet to come. But our united efforts, if based on this inner shift, can make an enormous difference.

The life journey that led the Dalai Lama to this vision has followed a complex course, but we can pick up the final trajectory to this book from the moment he attained a sustained global spotlight.

That global spotlight began when the Dalai Lama earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He was a new breed of celebrity. He was neither thrilled by fame and money nor overly eager for exposure in the world press. His very being seems to tell us you are not the center of the universe—relax your anxieties, drop your self-obsession, and dial down those me-first ambitions so you can think about others too. He immediately gave away the cash award that goes with the Nobel Prize. His main concern was who would be the most worthy recipients.

He refuses to be sanctimonious about himself and laughs at his own foibles. He flavors compassion with joy, not dour and empty platitudes.

Goleman notes that these traits are no doubt grounded in the study and practices the Dalai Lama has immersed himself in since childhood and and still devotes himself to for five hours each day (four in the morning and another hour at night). “His self-discipline in cultivating qualities like an investigative curiosity, equanimity, and compassion undergird a unique hierarchy of values that gives the Daily Lama the radically different perspective on the world from which his vision flows.”

Previous posts on the Dalai Lama have focused primarily on the benefits of different types of mindfulness and meditation. Their focus has been primarily on science. “A FORCE FOR GOOD: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for our World” has been written for the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman. It outlines the Dalai Lama’s ideas on how to improve this world. This vision is worthy of your attention and the following posts will try to extract his ideas within the limitations of blog posts. You are strongly encouraged to read the book itself. There is also a website associated with this book,http://joinaforce4good.org/learn. It is certainly worthy of repeated visits.

The following is taken from the Introduction to the book, which is written by the Dalai Lama:
“As a human being I acknowledge that my well-being depends on others and caring for others’ well-being is a moral responsibility I take seriously. It’s unrealistic to think that the future of humanity can be achieved on the basis of prayer or good wishes alone; what we need is to take action. Therefore, my first commitment is to contribute to human happiness as best I can. I am also a Buddhist monk, and according to my experience, all religious traditions have the potential to convey the message of love and compassion. So my second commitment is to foster harmony and friendly relations between them. Thirdly, I am a Tibetan, and although I have retired from political responsibility, I remain concerned to do what I can to help the Tibetan people, and to preserve our Buddhist culture and the natural environment of Tibet—-both of which are under threat of destruction.

The goal of happier human beings living together and supporting each other more fully in a more peaceful world is, I believe, something we can achieve. But we have to look at it taking a broad view and a long-term perspective. Change in ourselves and in the world in which we live may not take place in a hurry; it will take time. But if we don’t make the effort nothing will happen at all. The most important thing I hope readers will come to understand is that change will not take place because of decisions taken by governments or at the UN. Real change will take place when individuals transform themselves sided by the values that lie at the core of all human ethical systems, scientific findings, and common sense. While reading this book, please keep in mind that as human beings, equipped with marvelous intelligence and the potential for developing a warm heart, each and every one of us can become a force for good.

The title of this post is identical to the title of a book by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson. The subtitle is “Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. The following is taken from the Coda of the book: “We are inspired by the vision of the Dalai Lama. He encourages us all to do three things: gain composure, adopt a moral rudder of compassion, and act to better the world. The first, inner calm, and the second, navigating with compassion, can be products of meditation practice, as can executing the third, via skillful actions. Exactly what action we take, though, remains up to each of us, and depends on our individual abilities and possibilities—we each can be a force for good.”

We view this “curriculum” as one solution to an urgent public health need: reducing greed, selfishness, us/them thinking and impending eco-calamities, and promoting more kindness, clarity, and calm. Targeting and upgrading these human capacities directly could help break the cycle of some otherwise intractable social maladies, like ongoing poverty, intergroup hatreds, and mindlessness about our planet’s well-being.”

To be sure, there are still many, many questions about how altered traits occur, and much more research is needed. But the scientific data supporting altered traits have come together to the point that any reasonable scientist would agree that this inner shift seems possible. Yet too few of us at present realize this, let alone entertain the possibility for ourselves.

The scientific data, while necessary, are by no means sufficient for the change we envision. In a world growing more fractured and endangered, we need an alternative to mind-sets snarky and cynical, views fostered by focusing on the bad that happens each day rather than the far more numerous acts of goodness. In short, we have an even greater need for the human qualities altered traits foster.

We need more people of good will, who are more tolerant and patient, more kind and compassionate. And these can become qualities not just espoused but embodied.”

The philosophy espoused here is eudaemonism, which is a system of ethics that bases moral values on the likelihood that good actions will produce happiness. The exact opposite is hedonism, which is hardly an ethical theory, and maintains that pleasure is the highest good and proper aim of human life. There are several problems with hedonism. One is to take care of oneself and to screw everyone else. Poor health often is concomitant with pleasure. There also constraints on the amount of pleasure one can tolerate. Eudaemonism is unconstrained, promotes health, benefits others, and results in happiness. The hope is that eudaemonism is within us human beings and that meditation and mindfulness are activities that foster eudaemonism.

Understand that the goal here is not to convert people to Buddhism. The Dali Lama uses science to inform Buddhist ideology and practices. He sends monks to study science. Most religions at onetime had contemplative practices like meditation, and some still do. Rather than citing words by rote, prayer should be a meditative practice. It is important to realize that all religions, Buddhism included, have been created by human beings. What is spoken from the pulpit should not be taken uncritically. Rather, one needs to assess not only whether it corresponds with the stated doctrine and literature of the religion, but also whether it corresponds to a loving, just, and forgiving God.

Obviously, this book deserves many posts. Coleman and Davidson apply rigorous standards to assessing the data, so the conclusions above are justified. The primary criticism might well be that they are overly optimistic. Nevertheless, they are well worth pursuing.

Today is the day to give thanks for our blessings. Foremost among them is our memory. Memory provides the basis for all cognitive processes. We want to support it with healthy living and grow it with growth mindsets. We need to actively use our minds throughout out lives.

Thanksgiving is also the time to think of others. Tomorrow there will be a post on a book by Daniel Goleman titled “The Meditative Mind.” He is also the author of Emotional Intelligence. Then there will be eighteen posts on a book by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson titled “Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Our Mind, Brain, and Body.” It also can change how we interact with our fellow human beings to promote a better world.

This post is based on material in a revolutionary book by Lisa Feldman Barrett titled “HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE.” The first item is to remember to keep your body budget in good shape. Your interoceptive network works day and night, issuing predictions to maintain a healthy budget. This process is the origin of your affective feelings (pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal, and calmness). To feel good your brain’s predictions about your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, temperature, hormones, metabolism, and so forth, must be calibrated to your body’s actual needs. Otherwise you body budget gets out of whack, and you’re going to feel crappy. Unfortunately, modern culture seems to be engineered to screw up your body budget. Work and school schedules can make it difficult to get enough sleep, and junk food is omnipresent. What can be done about this? Try to adjust your schedule and diet as best you can. Regular exercise increases the levels of proteins called anti-inflammatory cytokines, that reduce your chances of developing heart diseases, depression, and other illnesses.

Your physical surroundings also affect your body budget, so if possible, try to spend time in spaces less noisy and crowded, and with more greenery and natural light. Reading a compelling novel is also beneficial for your body budget. When you get involved in someone else’s story you aren’t as involved in your own. These mental excursions engage part of your interoceptive network, known as the default mode network. And do not ruminate, and if you are ruminating, stop.

After you body budget, Dr. Barrett says that the next best thing to do for emotional health is to beef up your concepts, to become more emotionally intelligent. Remember that you create your emotional concepts. Emotional intelligence is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept for a given situation. Sometimes it is important not to construct emotions but instances of some other concept. Daniel Goleman, the author of the bestseller “Emotional Intelligence,” argues that higher emotional intelligence leads to success in academics, business, and social relationships.

Dr. Barrett writes that there are many ways to gain new concepts: walking in the woods, taking trips, reading books, watching movies, trying unfamiliar foods. She says to be a collector of experiences. Try on new perspectives the way you try on new clothing. These kinds of activities will provoke your brain to combine concepts to form new ones, changing your conceptual system proactively so you’ll predict and behave differently later.

Try to develop higher emotional granularity. A collection of scientific studies indicate that people who could distinguish finely among their unpleasant feelings, say fifty shades of feeling crappy, were 30% more flexible when regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed, and less likely to retaliate against someone who has hurt them.

Rather than ruminating about something unpleasant, keep track of positive experiences. Each time you attend to positive things, you tweak your conceptual system, reinforcing concepts about those positive events and making them salient in the mental model of your world.

If you deal with children, be positive and try not to say negative things. Studies have shown that children in low-income homes hear 125,000 more words of discouragement than praise, while their higher-income counterparts hear 560,000 more words of praise than discouragement, all by age four. If a child is whining incessantly, instead of yelling “Knock it off,” try something like, “your whining its irritating me, so stop it.”

Dr Barrett offers the following tips for mastering feelings in the moment. She says that the simplest approach is to move your body. She writes that moving your body can change you’re predictions and therefore your experience.

Another approach is to change your location or situation. For example, during the Vietnam War, 15% of U.S. soldiers are addicted to heroin. When they returned home, 95% stayed off the drug their first year back. Given the strong addictive effects of heroin, this is an extraordinary result.

Dr. Barrett writes that recategorization is a tool of the emotion expert. The more concepts you know and the more instances you can construct, the more effectively you can recategorize in this manner to master your emotions and regulate your behavior. So, if you’re about to take a test and feel affectively worked up, you might categorized your feeling as harmful anxiety (“Oh, no, I’m doomed”) or as helpful anticipation (“I’m energized and reading to go!”).

Last, but certainly not least, is meditation. She notes that key regions in the interoceptive and control networks are larger for meditators, and connections between these regions are stronger. Some studies have seen stronger connections even after only a few hours of training. Other studies find that meditation reduces stress, improves the detection and processing of prediction error, facilitates recategorization (termed “emotion regulation,”) and reduces unpleasant affect.

When I was a graduate student in the seventies studying cognition, emotions were of little interest. We needed to research cognition, the important stuff. Emotions were something of concern to clinicians and those dealing with mental illness, not something with which we hard-nosed scientists needed to be concerned. Richard Davidson was a graduate student the same time that I was, but he immediately saw the folly in this view. He completed his requirements for a doctoral degree and has done research which has developed a coherent view of emotion, the brain structures and processes underlying emotion, and methods for modifying our emotions. The last point is most important because he has shown that, regardless of any innate predispositions, we can control and change our emotions.

I did not have the prescience of Davidson. I held the contempt for the study of emotion that was prevalent at that time. In retrospect I can see how foolish I was. It is our emotional states that determine not only our happiness and satisfaction, but also the effectiveness of our interactions with the environment. Emotions are a key factor in a healthy memory. Emotional problems promote an unhealthy and ineffective memory.

Davidson is a most remarkable fellow. He is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Time magazine named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2006. Much of Davidson’s work has been published in his book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain.

He has identified six dimensions of emotional style: Resilience, Outlook, Social Intuition, Self Awareness, Social Context, and Attention. Each of these dimensions is characterized by different interactions of structures in the brain, the activities of which can be observed and measured. He relates these dimensions to personality and explains how they develop. He relates them to normal and abnormal patterns and explains when “different” becomes pathological. What is most important is his elucidation of the plasticity of the brain and how emotional styles can be changed. He provides a questionnaire test to self-assess one’s position on the six dimensions. He also provides exercises one can use to modify one’s emotional style. External resources are also identified.

This book is highly readable. It is a joy to read. He added a co-author, Sharon Begley, to assure its readability and accessibility. Many personal stories are included. His experiences as a research assistant in a sleep laboratory when he was in high school, his undergraduate studies, his graduate studies including his meetings with fellow graduate student Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence), his professional career including his trips to Central Asia, and his relationship with the Dali Lama are entertainingly presented.

This is an important book. Accordingly, I plan to devote a substantial number of Healthymemory Blog posts to it. But there is no way I can even come close to giving this book its just due. I strongly encourage you to get and read the book. It should not only be interesting, but also personally rewarding.